Air Travel Might Be Weakening Again
New Home Sales Actually Miss Estimates The impossible happened. A housing data point missed estimates. New home sales in September fell from 994,000 to 959,000 which significantly missed estimates for 1.016 million and the lowest estimate which was 1 million. Furthermore, the August reading was revised lower from 1.011 million. The chart below shows this is…
Great October For Regional Banks
Another Rally For Small Caps The stock market increased slightly on Friday as the small caps outperformed again. Trend has been in favor of banks because the yield curve has been steepening and the long bond has been selling off. This hasn’t exactly been bad for growth tech stocks. Yields aren’t high enough for them…
Why The Super Bowl Could Symbolize Economic Healing
Spending By City Consumer spending isn’t correlated with the cities with the largest COVID-19 outbreaks. It’s more about the economic restrictions. That's not saying the economy would be fine without the restrictions. It's just looking at the data in the table below and comparing it to the spike in cases in the fall. For example,…
Regional Banks Hot As Yields Rise
Another Rally In Regional Banks The stock market rallied modestly on Thursday with the small caps doing the best because of the financials. S&P 500 rose 52 basis points, the Nasdaq was up 19 basis points, and the Russell 2000 rose 1.65%. Despite tech lagging. Snap exploded again. The stock rose 7% to a new…
Labor Market Gets Back To Improving
Fantastic Jobless Claims Based on the recent jobless claims reports, we were all expecting another weak reading. Instead we got a strong downward revision and a decline this past week. California came back to the fold after a 3 week hiatus. First week they accepted claims, there was probably a huge backlog to deal with.…
Tesla Still Can’t Make A Profit From Its Actual Business
Another Modest Decline The stock market fell modestly on Wednesday with the small caps falling the hardest despite the outperformance of the banks. That’s because small cap growth stocks were weak again. It appears that the market is dealing with a bunch of factors at once. We have the uncertainty over the election. It’s worried…
Beige Book Index Snaps Back But Restaurants Still In Trouble
Job Postings Improve As you know, the initial jobless claims reading was poor last week. It didn’t include California data, but the rest of the country was weak. We should get the California data in the next 1-2 weeks. Initial claims report this week is expected to show an additional 865,000 claims which is just…
Treasuries Selloff On Stimulus Hopes
Modest Rally On Stimulus Murmurs The stock market rallied sharply on Tuesday before giving up much of the gains in the afternoon. At the peak, the market was up 1.4% and it closed up 47 basis points. Rumors are swirling about vaccines, treatments, and a stimulus deal. Pelosi changed her deadline from Tuesday to the…
Single Family Housing Permits Hit A Cycle High - No Bubble This Time
Redbook Recovers Obviously, each Redbook same store sales report is just one week of data, but some readings are very interesting. In the week of October 17th, same store sales growth rose from 1.2% to 2.5% which is a good sign because it seemed like the economy was falling back quickly. This isn’t a good…
Do Or Die For The Stimulus Talks
Stimulus Woes Hurt Stocks The stock market fell sharply on Monday as investors feared a stimulus won’t pass. We will find out if that fear is true on Tuesday. Nancy Pelosi set a 48 hour deadline for a deal on Sunday. Obviously, politicians change their minds all the time, but if Steve Mnuchin and Pelosi…